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Cork is great for deadening sound, ie neutralizing standing wave echoes (I use it in the control room of my studio), but it doesn’t really have any sound proofing/sound insulating properties.
Matteresses as suggested as a quick fix, it just seems from your situation that you may need quite a few.
Maybe get creative with your microphone use and placement and the amount of gain you are using to record with.
What microphones/recording device/other gear are you using for your project?
adam
Thanks everybody for your replies so far. Its given me a start. The father of the bride is an accomplished violinist that likes this sort of thing, so I assumed we are looking at eastern european here. I’ve heard some of those fiddle guys and doubt that my technique is up to it but was hoping to find a couple of “standards” that I can misinterpret.
Georgina,
Its a complex subject but I’m sure that it would be covered under “fair usage” in Australia. If it ever got to court I would imagine most magistrates would be furious about having their time wasted on something like this. Doubt that Phillipa would get locked up with Chopper Reed.
regards adam
Sylvia, I’m out playing all the time, but I don’t play with sheet music as I don’t think its a good look and it leaves the possibility open for all sorts of nasty things to happen to the music while you are playing. As for the iPad, I think thats a wonderful application of the technology, but I’m yet to see an iPad out here, it hasn’t really caught on as being a must have gadget.
As far as a book of experiences goes, I haven’t seen/heard of anything like that, not for harp at any rate. I live in western australia, if you were to cut australia into 3 equal pieces vertically, WA would be the left bit. There are no harp shops in WA. I would be surprised if there were more than 6 players doing gigs. In some ways, it is a very primative and isolated place. I’ve started a bit of a blog about the kind of things that happen at my gigs on my website (http://www.AdamBHarris.net) but since I’ve started the blog, not much has happenned!
Things are much better on the east coast, with more people, more harpists, some shops and manufacturers (Andrew Thom, Denwar, Branden Lassels etc).
If I see any books on playing experiences, you will be the first to know.
have a great day
adam
When I said “a binder with photocopied sheets in is definately the way to go” you have to remember that I haven’t done a gig with sheet music for years and we didn’t have any iWhatnow? back then. Even still i don’t think we got dem new fangled things in western australia.
Another problem with using a fakebook on a gig is that somebody may come up, flick through your fakebook and ask you to play a piece in there that you may not be comfortable playing. If you have to use sheet music,
At home I use sheet music to learn tunes or maybe give me ideas for tunes to learn. On a gig I will play the tunes pretty much by ear using my own arrangements. I improvise, in that sometimes I will play things a bit differently or reharmonize the tune on the fly (if I am having a good day!) but I won’t be sitting there playing randomly, everything will be based on something that i’ve played before.
I don’t recommend relying on sheet music at gigs. Bad things can happen to sheet music, it can blow away or fall off the stand or something. Also it places a barrier between you and the audience which is not a great thing, even when doing background music gigs.
I’m in the process of recording a Christmas CD with harp, so I have recently bought up everything I could find that was remotely related as reference material.
Christmas with the St James Harp Quartet is a stand out. There is not much in the way of liner note information and the cover isn’t much to look at. What makes it such an excellent CD is their approach to the material, imaginative arranging and reharmonization techniques breathe new life into the old classics.
Its a CD I could happily listen to all year round. It has given me a standard to aspire to in my recording.
Bump.
I’m looking at getting an instrument with an extended soundboard next year and would like to know as well.
I can understand harp naming for personalization and convenience, but generally when you name a harp you are assigning a gender to it (assuming a non – unisex name) which I find disturbing for some reason.
